1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved network computing system, and in particular to a method and apparatus for managing a network computing system. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and apparatus for selecting a master network manager in a network computing system.
2. Description of Related Art
In a System Area Network (SAN), the hardware provides a message passing mechanism which can be used for Input/Output devices (I/O) and interprocess communications between general computing nodes (IPC). Processes executing on devices access SAN message passing hardware by posting send/receive messages to send/receive work queues on a SAN channel adapter (CA). These processes also are referred to as “consumers”. The send/receive work queues (WQ) are assigned to a consumer as a queue pair (QP). The messages can be sent over five different transport types: Reliable Connected (RC), Reliable datagram (RD), Unreliable Connected (UC), Unreliable Datagram (UD), and Raw Datagram (RawD). Consumers retrieve the results of these messages from a completion queue (CQ) through SAN send and receive work completions (WC). The source channel adapter takes care of segmenting outbound messages and sending them to the destination. The destination channel adapter takes care of reassembling inbound messages and placing them in the memory space designated by the destination's consumer. Two channel adapter types are present, a host channel adapter (HCA) and a target channel adapter (TCA). The host channel adapter is used by general purpose computing nodes to access the SAN fabric. Consumers use SAN verbs to access host channel adapter functions. The software that interprets verbs and directly accesses the channel adapter is known as the channel interface (CI).
These consumers are located on nodes within the SAN. A SAN may contain hundreds or thousands of nodes depending on the particular configuration. In managing a SAN, one or more nodes may be selected to function as a master, which is responsible for configuring and managing the SAN. Redundancies and efficient selection of a master is desirable within a SAN. Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method and apparatus for selecting a master.